


After the Storm

by greymcdreamysgh



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 19:07:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28640484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greymcdreamysgh/pseuds/greymcdreamysgh
Summary: MER/DER. A short serial that takes place immediately following the season 7 finale. How do you recover after the storm? Written in 2011 and crossposted from ff.net
Relationships: Meredith Grey & Derek Shepherd, Meredith Grey/Derek Shepherd
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

_And after the storm,_  
_I run and run as the rains come_  
_And I look up, I look up,_  
_On my knees and out of luck,_  
_I look up._

It takes them both awhile to fall asleep. It seems like Zola can't get comfortable; she settles into Derek's arms so much more easily than she does Meredith's and now, even though it's late, she won't settle. It's all happened so quickly; it seems like they just started this process, and now this baby's here and they aren't ready for her.

It troubles her that she can't think of a single lullaby. Maybe that would help Zola. As far as she knows, nobody has been singing to her lately, but maybe they used to, and now she's in a new place and she can't sleep because there's no song. She won't stay in her porta-crib. Meredith tries a few times, holding her until she falls asleep before she puts her in there, but without fail, it doesn't take her long to wake up again.

She thinks it's probably because of the lullaby thing, until she feels the mattress of the porta-crib. It's plastic and thin, and it's no wonder Zola can't sleep. When she realizes that Derek isn't coming home, she changes into her pajamas, and holds Zola in bed with her. She doesn't know any lullabies, but she shushes her and pats her back, and that seems to work well enough. Zola finally falls asleep with her head on Meredith's shoulder, holding her hair.

She hopes it won't take her long to figure out what Zola needs. The nurse must have expected her to know already, because she gave her diapers, pacifiers, and a crib, but no advice on what to do with the actual baby. She tells herself that not knowing what to do does not mean she's a bad mother, it just means that she honestly does not know right now. If Zola is clean and sleeping peacefully, that must be a good start. But she'd be lying if she said that what Derek said earlier didn't get in her head.

Resting against the headboard, all she can think about is what's literally hanging over her. There's a post-it with their signatures on it, where he wrote in his own scrawled longhand, "Love each other even when we hate each other. No running." She's not the kind of person who makes promises lightly. She didn't think he was either. She doesn't want to spend much time dwelling on it, but she can't decide if whether or not she's surprised that he's the one who broke the vow first, not her. She's not worried about the loving each other part, not really. But up until now, she thought that a big part of living up to the loving each other part was showing up.

In the dark, alone, she starts making plans. Part of being a good mother is keeping your promises; she knows that much. And she promised Zola that she would get it together, so she makes a mental list: a real crib, clothes, toys, more diapers, and books about adoption and raising kids with spina bifida. She will start tomorrow. Hopefully Derek will come home by then.

Cristina never comes upstairs. Derek doesn't come home. And Lexie's quite surprised when a crying baby wakes her at one o'clock in the morning, but she goes downstairs and makes a bottle for Zola anyway. Lexie looks like she has a lot of questions when she brings the bottle upstairs, but fortunately, Zola falls back to sleep and, in the interest of not waking her, Meredith doesn't have to answer any of them.

It starts raining at around two o'clock in the morning. He's not sure why he's surprised; it is Seattle, after all. But it does mean that this evening's sleeping arrangement is about to get much more uncomfortable. Karev took the trailer somewhere, and this house is, despite all their plans, still nothing more than a frame. He only lets himself stand in the rain for a few minutes before he throws his sleeping bag into his car and drives back to the hospital.

When he gets there, Meredith's gone, of course. Being here just reminds him of everything that's transpired in the past 24 hours, and when he thinks about it, the fury and the frustration come back all over again. He's blindsided, but it's not about the trial itself, at least not really. What is he supposed to do now? He knows he said that he didn't care, that he'd always take care of her, but he does care. He wants her here with him.

They're having a baby. In twenty years, Zola won't even be out of college. She has to be here for that. He knows that this was just a clinical trial, that he had a one in a million chance of curing Alzheimer's, but at least he would have been able to try. Now he doesn't even have that. Just when he thought that everything was all right, that she was all right, she consciously decided to self-destruct. He never saw it coming, and yet somehow, all of it feels very familiar.

He's not on duty and it's a quiet night, so there's no work for him here, at least not until morning. He's got to figure things out with Meredith. They just got married; it shouldn't be like this. She keeps calling, but he needs to get himself together, to not be so angry when he looks at her, before he says more things that he's not even sure if he means.

Before he tries to go back to sleep in an empty on-call room, he goes upstairs to visit Zola. When he gets to her room, though, she's not there. He feels like a brick has dropped into his stomach when he looks at the empty crib. Fear chokes him, paralyzes him for a second. He runs through everything in his mind: her incisions from the hernia surgery were healing well, her pain was under control, and the shunt he put in last month was successfully draining the fluid from her head. They've been up here with her every day for weeks. She was fine. Surely somebody would have paged him if she wasn't.

They know all of Zola's nurses now. He turns to the nurses' station and asks Bonnie, "Where's Zola?"

Bonnie frowns. "Zola was discharged earlier tonight. Your wife took her home a few hours ago."

The book says to expect sleepless nights for weeks after bringing your baby home, but Meredith doesn't think they meant that those nights would be quite like this. Zola's asleep, nestled in bed next to her with a clean diaper and a full belly. She's the one who's still awake. She's trying to come up with a plan, to get it together, but her head is way too full right now. She's got a pregnant best friend sleeping downstairs, and a jilted friend and a pissed off husband sleeping who knows where. She gets tired of the frat house sometimes—lately, she's been pushing Derek to get on their contractor to finally finish their house in the woods—but with so many people missing, this house feels emptier than she thought it could. She won't let herself imagine a scenario in which she has to do this alone, but she can't see far enough ahead to see how they all recover from this.

She's afraid to turn the lamp on so she can read more from Your Baby's First Year, she's afraid to make one more phone call that Derek won't answer, and she's afraid to leave Zola to go downstairs and wake Cristina. So between laying a hand gently on Zola's back, just to make sure she's breathing well, and trying to figure out how to check her diaper without waking her, she keeps on thinking.

What she keeps coming back to is that it's weird how history repeats itself; how, twenty five years later, she's taken a page right out of her mother's book. Somehow, she made the decision to cheat. Richard Webber all but asked her to, and now she's frayed her career and her marriage, pulling threads and breaking oaths. And worst of all, there's a little girl in the middle. Somehow, all of it feels very familiar.

She thought she knew. It took her twenty-five years, but she thought that she finally had it figured out.

_Do you think we're like them? Our mothers?_

_Be extraordinary. She wasn't talking about surgery at all._

_It's Meredith. Not Ellis._

_I'm hoping to be your mama._

She has lived under the shadow that Ellis Grey cast over this hospital for five years. People expect things from her because of it. People think they know her, and who she will be, when they hear her name. And for a long time, she thought her name determined those things too. For five years—for her whole life, really—it's been a balancing act; keep the good and try to push away the bad. She's been trying. She thought she almost had it right. She was trying to lean into the fear and get a happy ending, or whatever psychobabble crap she used to tell herself. But now he's in her head. He thinks that maybe she is her mother's daughter after all.

When she hears the front door open at three AM, she's not sure who it's less likely to be, Derek or Alex. But when their bedroom door opens a moment later, Derek stands before her.

He's soaked. She can't be sure whether he came home to get clothes, or he came home because he wanted to see her.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asks.

She stares at him for a second. He looks around at all of Zola's things in their room, at the baby in their bed. He starts to say more, but before he can, she shushes him. She can't tell if he is shocked, or angry, but Zola's not going to find out at the same time she is. As quietly as she can, she eases herself off the bed and ushers him out of the room, pulling their door almost all the way closed behind her.

Across the hall, in Alex's empty room, he asks again, "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I called you five times, Derek. Would you have preferred a singing telegram? Sky-writing?"

She knows she's being a bitch, but she's been up all night, and when she thinks about it, bad mother or not, she's the one who is here with the baby, not him.

"Meredith."

"I told you to call me. I told you it was important. What did you want me to say?"

"Tell me that you had the baby with you!"

It takes a lot for him to yell; he hisses through pursed lips sometimes when they fight, or when he's angry with an intern. But it takes a lot for him to yell. She can tell it's taking everything out of him not to yell right now; he catches himself when his volume escalates. She rarely yells either. She knows they don't need to, that they hurt each other well enough without it.

"Why? Are you afraid I would mess her up that quickly? Did you think that my bad mother vibes would screw up her ethical compass on the first night?"

"Meredith, stop."

"No, I mean I can see how you would be concerned," she says. "Obviously if I'm screwed up enough to destroy your clinical trial, then I'm way too screwed up to raise a kid. Of course it would be disconcerting to you to think that I could take care of her without you."

He can't control himself this time.

"No, what was disconcerting to me was walking into the hospital at two in the morning to find that Zola's gone," he yells, before he catches himself. "Don't put this on me."

Meredith hears a mattress groan and the floorboards creak under the weight of bare feet a few paces down the hall. Somebody's bedroom door opens and then closes again. She listens for Zola too, but hears nothing.

It's not the first middle-of-the-night fight that's been had in this house, and something tells her that it won't be the last. But Zola's father can't deal with her screwed up mother (She doesn't feel like her mother yet. Does that mean she's a bad one?), and so they are fighting. If this was going to happen again, she didn't think it would happen this time on the first freaking day. That has to be some kind of record, even for a Grey.

"Derek, I'm not putting anything on you. I'm repeating, practically verbatim, what you said earlier." As much as she wants to put on a strong face, to prove him wrong, she can't keep the hurt out of her voice. "I'm going to be a bad mother. Zola shouldn't be with me."

Most of the time he gets upset when she cries, but not this time. "That's not what I said."

"Really? Because that's what it sounded like."

It's exactly what he said, but that's not the point. What hurts almost more than the words themselves is the sentiment behind them: that once again she has disappointed him, that she's not what he thought she was, that he was stupid to ever trust her in the first place and somehow that's her fault. Just when he thought she was whole and healed, he gets the unpleasant surprise that maybe she is still as fucked up as she ever was.

A part of her knows that it's backwards when he thinks that. The thing he's never understood—and maybe she's thinking this now because they're both so angry that they don't know what to do with themselves—is that when their relationship gets fucked up, it always hurts her more than it hurts him. Somehow he always gets to feel like he's the sane one and she's the damaged one. She remembers a diamond glittering in the grass, and she knows that's all bullshit. It's not that simple.

"I said I don't know. That's what I said. I said I don't know."

"Well, I didn't have time to not know," she says. "Because Zola was ready to go home, and we have temporary custody, and you went completely AWOL. I called you five times. A lot of good that did. You should have answered your phone."

He looks around for the first time at the empty room, at the mattress with no sheets. She's already going for the door when he asks, "Where is Alex?"

"I have no idea."

She can't think about all of that right now. It's already too much with the baby, and with Derek, and with wondering if he thinks she even has a right to be angry with him. She can't add in Alex, who is probably drinking himself under the table at Joe's right now. Not tonight. She didn't know what she was expecting when she told him to get his crap out of her house, but she is surprised that he's gone so quickly. He cleared the way for Zola to come home; he should come home too. She doesn't know if he ever will. That's too much for one night.

She starts to leave, but he doesn't move. She really is exhausted, and if Zola's still asleep, maybe she can get some rest too. They can't solve this now; there's no point in trying.

"Meredith."

She turns around. "What?"

"That's it?"

"Yeah, Derek," she sighs. She's embarrassed not because there are tears in her eyes but because she feels like she has to hide them. "That's it. You walked out. That wasn't part of the deal. So for tonight, that's it. Come get some clothes, and see the baby."

He follows her into their bedroom, pulls a t-shirt and sweats out of his top drawer, and leans over his side of the bed to look at Zola's face. Her pacifier has fallen out of her mouth, leaving a small damp ring on the sheets, but she's still asleep.

"Don't wake her up," she says as she eases herself as carefully as she can into bed next to the baby.

"I won't."

"Sleep in Alex's room," she says. He looks a little shocked at first, but he goes anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

_Well I guess I'll just go home,  
Oh God knows where.  
Because death is just so full and man so small.  
Well I'm scared of what's behind and what's before._

He's disoriented when his phone wakes him up the next morning. It's only two hours after he comes back home, so it's more of a nap than a night's sleep. Everything that they have said to each other, and all that has transpired—it hits him like a hangover, behind his eyes and in his gut.

The house is still quiet when he goes downstairs to put on a pot of coffee. Cristina's asleep on the couch, and he prays that she doesn't wake up. He thinks that over the past year, they've come to some sort of understanding and maybe even a friendship, but he will absolutely not be having this conversation with her. Upstairs, he takes a towel out of the linen closet and showers in the bathroom that everybody else shares so he can go as long as possible without waking—ok, without having to confront—Meredith. He steals shampoo from Avery, but realizes that he might not have time to shave today.

He eases open the door of their bedroom when he's done. Meredith and Zola are asleep in bed, Zola with one arm over her head lying on her back and Meredith on her side with a hand near Zola. Meredith is so close to the edge of the bed that he wonders how she didn't fall out, especially when he sees all of their pillows on the floor, but then he realizes that Zola is close to the middle and the pillows are for her. He says nothing, deciding to just let them sleep, and sneaks as quietly as he can into their own bathroom to dress and deal with his hair.

Cristina's still asleep on the couch when he pours himself a cup of coffee and looks around. It seems like the hospital sent them home with a lot of things. There are sample-size cans of formula and a pack of unopened bottles on the kitchen counter, and their bedroom is suddenly full of baby supplies. He has thought about what the first night home from the hospital with his firstborn would be like off and on for fifteen years, ever since he and Addison were newlyweds but more and more now that he and Meredith have been trying so hard to have a baby. He never thought it would be like this, but then again, it seems like nothing ever turns out the way he thinks it will.

While he's waiting, he makes a bottle for Zola. There isn't much formula left in the can that's already opened, just enough for about four ounces, so he uses it all and hopes that will be enough at least to start. In a half hour, he can hear alarm clocks begin to go off, footsteps creaking on the hardwood upstairs, and the water of the shower turning on again. Meredith comes downstairs with Zola in her arms. Zola's eyes are still sleepy; she looks around as wide-eyed as she can for someone who has just woken up.

"Hi, Zola," he says softly. "What do you think of your new house?" Zola smiles when she sees him, and snuggles closer to Meredith. The hangover feeling in his stomach gets a little worse for a second.

Meredith hands him the baby and sits down. "Hi," he says. He hugs Zola close, and kisses her cheek before turning to Meredith. "How was your night?" he asks.

"Long." She looks more exhausted than he does. Usually, when she comes downstairs, she is showered, dressed, and ready to walk out the door. Today, she looks like her nerves are absolutely shot. "Is there coffee?" she asks.

"Yeah." He gets up, shifting Zola to his hip, and pours Meredith a cup of coffee, and takes the bottle he made out of the fridge for Zola. "I have a bottle for her. Will she drink it cold?"

Meredith has both hands wrapped around her mug, drinking her coffee black. "I don't know," she says. She sounds stressed, but in a nervous way, not an angry way. "Last night, it was kind of lukewarm. Maybe leave it out for a few minutes first?"

But when Zola sees the bottle, she reaches for it anyway, cold or not. He sits down with her in the chair next to Meredith, Zola in one arm and the bottle in the opposite hand. "Let's just try it," he says.

When Zola takes the bottle, drinking greedily, Meredith looks down into her cup. He's so engrossed with the baby who is finally in his arms, in his house, that he barely notices that it takes Meredith awhile to talk again. When she does, she asks quietly, "Are you going to work today?"

He glances over at the clock on the oven and snaps back into reality. He could have chalked this morning up to exhaustion if he didn't know that he still had this whole mess to sort out at the hospital.

"I have to. I have to meet with the FDA. Will you be ok with her?" He hands Zola, who is still holding her bottle, back to Meredith. "I can come home right after."

Milk drips down Zola's front. Meredith reaches for a napkin from the holder at the center of the table, and dabs around her mouth, trying to get everything before Zola's shirt gets wet. Zola tilts her head back a little as she drinks, and Meredith adjusts her so she's more settled in her arms.

"We'll be fine. We're going to go out for awhile," she says, "But we'll see you when we come back."

He hasn't given it much thought until now, but he wonders about the logistics of transporting Zola around with limited supplies. The hospital must have given them a car seat, but up until now, he's thought of Zola as someone who would stay in place for awhile. They never got to take her anywhere further than down the hall from her hospital room, and it seems strange that now they can just put her in their car and drive her all over the city if they want to. It's stranger still that Meredith has already done it, wants to do it again, and doesn't seem to care what he thinks about it.

"Where are you going?" he asks. His mug is empty and he's going to be late for work if he doesn't leave soon.

"She needs things, Derek. She can't sleep in that porta-crib again."

They were supposed to do this together. He didn't know it was going to be today, or even this week. They never talked about stuff like this while they were trying to get pregnant; after months of disappointment, conversations about a baby's room felt depressing and foolish. But since they decided to adopt Zola, it had come up more than once. Of course, they thought they'd be decorating in their new house, not cramming more stuff into an already-packed home. They'd just have to figure it out.

He's waited for this for a long time, and he wants to turn this around. When he asks her if she will wait a few hours until he gets home, she agrees.

A conference call with the trial's institutional review board is scheduled for 11 AM. He wants to spend some time coming up with a game plan, but by the time he rounds on his post-op patients, it's time to call in.

It's unraveling fast. He knows that this trial is flashy, that there's a lot of money and a lot of emotion involved. The rational part of him is not surprised that it will crash down this quickly, but he thought he would at least have a few days to wrap his own head around all of this before he has to deal with anything beyond the trial's repercussions in his personal life. Richard asks if Derek wants him on the call, but he shakes him off. Somehow, he feels like Richard's being there will not help.

There are three doctors on the phone. They start by saying that they want to, and will, schedule a face-to-face meeting, but that they needed more time to coordinate schedules first. They couldn't get everyone on short notice, so they'll start with just the three of them and the phone call.

"Dr. Shepherd," the gruff but clear voice of Dr. Pollock, the head of the trial's IRB, begins. "Please describe for us what you believe has happened with the administration of your clinical trial."

Derek wonders if that's just how this guy talks, or if he's already pissed. With the phone on speaker, the sensation of that voice in this empty office somehow makes him feel more stressed than he already is. He picks the phone up and holds it to his ear, gripping the receiver tightly. He glances at a picture of him and Meredith on his desk. It was taken a few years ago—by Izzie, he's pretty sure—on a slow night when they were both on-call. Meredith's sitting on top of the desk at the nurses' station, and he's in the chair next to her, but leaning up out of it. They were the victims of Izzie in one of her sentimental moods. He's kissing her cheek, and she's smiling. They are both wearing scrubs and they're both happy.

He starts talking. "It came to our attention yesterday that a resident working closely with me on the trial improperly accessed information regarding which subjects were to receive the placebo and which were to receive the experimental drug." He pauses and sighs before he continues. "Because of a personal connection to one of the subjects, who was scheduled to receive the placebo, the resident switched out her information with that of another subject. None of this was disclosed to me or to any of the other supervising physicians until yesterday, when another resident approached one of our attendings."

"Were either the whistleblower or the other attending involved in the trial?" Dr. Pollock asks.

"No."

"Dr. Shepherd, this is Dr. Ingram," a woman chimes in. "I'd like to follow up on the trial's methodology, which you mentioned a moment ago. Is it correct that this is a single-blind study?"

He doesn't like the way she asks, like she already knows he's done something wrong. In a sense, he supposes that she does know that. He hates that he has to answer for all of this, especially when he does not yet _have_ all the answers. He wishes that he could somehow put this on Richard, or on Meredith, to deal with. He hates this feeling of being judged, of failure.

"In a sense, yes." He continues on as best he can, and hopes that he does not come off as shaken. All he can do now is tell the truth and hope for the best, but he's not really expecting anything but the worst.

"All subjects were randomly assigned by computer whether they would receive the placebo or the drug, and that data was handled by an individual who was not involved in any capacity with the study other than to work in the laboratory where the data was stored. We only learned which to administer in the OR as the surgery was about to begin, and had no role in assigning subjects to the control group or to the experimental group. The subjects themselves were never informed whether they received the drug or not."

He hopes he sounds prepared, and that he's telling them what they want to hear. Ten or fifteen seconds go by without anyone speaking. It feels like an eternity. He turns in his chair a little and grips the fabric of his trousers with his free hand, bunching it up and then flexing his fingers.

"Dr. Shepherd, this is Dr. Bollhardt speaking," the third doctor, another man, finally says. "Is it correct that all post-operative evaluations were to be conducted by you and the resident assisting on the trial?"

"That is correct."

"What course of action has the hospital taken so far?"

He takes a deep breath, one he hopes they can't hear, and says, "The resident who skewed the trial's data has been suspended without pay, and reinstatement will be determined by the chief of surgery and an additional panel of physicians after two months. Scheduled surgeries are postponed and all subjects have been notified that all trial proceedings have been halted until further notice."

"Well, Dr. Shepherd, any accusation or admission of scientific misconduct, especially on a trial using human subjects, is taken very seriously. It was appropriate to stop all activities associated with this trial, and we will need to conduct a more formal review."

It's what he expected, but it doesn't mean it hurts any less. Since yesterday, it has been slowly sinking in that his chance is over. It's a crushing defeat. In his last clinical trial, they were killing people left and right. This one felt like it was working right from the start. But he shouldn't think about that, because now it's done.

There's nothing else to say but what comes next: "I would be happy to cooperate with that review process."

"We're pleased to hear that," Dr. Ingram says. "Whatever misconduct that may have occurred on the part of the resident, frankly—and I'll speak for myself here—I need to review the methodology of this study more closely. It seems like bias has come into the study at several points, certainly most egregiously with the incident that prompted this discussion. But I am troubled by the amount of involvement that you and your colleague have with this trial. Again, I need to review the information more extensively but, on first glance, what strikes me is that you both would have knowledge of the course of treatment during your post-op evaluations of the patients. Whatever personal biases may have occurred before surgery, it seems to be compounded by the potential for subconscious biases in the evaluation phase."

"Dr. Ingram, let's not get ahead of ourselves here," Dr. Pollock says.

"No, as I said, we do need to conduct a formal review," she says. "I am merely informing Dr. Shepherd of my concerns."

He feels beaten down now. It's unfair that he has to deal with this burden and take this flogging alone. If they knew what the stakes were for him, they would know that he would never do anything to jeopardize this.

"Again," he says. "I am happy to cooperate with you and to provide you with whatever information you may need as the review process moves forward."

"Thank you, Dr. Shepherd," Dr. Pollock says. "Seattle Grace-Mercy West has forwarded us the collected data for your study up to this point, and we will be looking at it carefully over the next few days and weeks. You have already done so, but you are required to stop administering the experimental treatment until further notice"

What comes next is a bomb he wasn't expecting.

"We also will be notifying the AMA regarding the resident in question," Dr. Pollock continues. "As you know, penalties for scientific misconduct also fall under their jurisdiction. Thank you for your time and cooperation, Dr. Shepherd. We'll be in touch."

He sits in stunned silence for a second before he says thank you and hangs up the phone.

* * *

It all takes up a lot more time than she thought it would. She feels sort of like a lab tech for this part, with all the sterilization that needs to happen before she can make these bottles. She's also realizing the need for a highchair, now that she's trying to do all this stuff with nowhere to put Zola. The whole house suddenly feels like a death trap.

She sits Zola on the counter with one arm around her waist. She squints at the small print on the can of formula and uses her other hand to scoop the requisite amount of powder into the five open bottles. The can empties faster than she thought it would.

"See, we're figuring it out, right?" she says. Zola stares at her, and leans towards her to reach for the can. Grabbing it, she bangs it on the counter, pleased with herself, she laughs.

Meredith forgot what it felt like when she laughed. For a second, last night and this morning and all the tenseness that exists in the space between her and Derek goes away. She can see why it's so easy for parents to love their children. Zola grips the rim of the empty can tightly and bangs it on the counter again. She laughs harder this time, and sticks out her tongue a little.

"Is that fun?" she asks the baby, a smile creeping across her face. Zola snickers and hits the can again. As best she can, Meredith screws the nipples onto the bottles with one hand and says, "We need to get you better toys."

Zola drinks one of the bottles quickly, sitting in the corner of the couch in the crook of Meredith's elbow. Alex wasn't kidding when he said yesterday that she was feeding normally. She wonders if she's giving her enough food; they've fed her a few times in the hospital but the nurses always kept track of how much and how often she needed to eat. She hasn't given it much thought until now. Zola's still sucking on the bottle, which only has air in it now.

"Are you still hungry?" she asks. She takes the bottle from Zola, who promptly starts crying. "Well, you only have two teeth, so I don't know. Let's see."

She's scared to leave her alone, so she shifts Zola to her hip and carries her back to the kitchen. "Let's see," she says again, but Zola keeps crying. She bounces her on her hip and hopes that she's crying more out of indignation than anything else. "What can I give you?"

She peels a banana, breaks off a little piece with her fingers and offers it to Zola. She kind of just gums at it for awhile, and ultimately, Meredith winds up mashing the entire thing as best she can in a bowl. She grabs Izzie's plastic measuring cups from the drawer, and sits Zola down on the living room floor. She feeds Zola tiny bites with a spoon that seems entirely too big for her mouth, but Zola doesn't seem to mind. She grunts when Meredith isn't fast enough with the next bite, and has a good time banging Izzie's measuring cups on the floor.

It feels quiet with just the two of them there. It's unnerving and different, but not bad. She just needs to get used to it. It feels like a whole day has passed already, but it's only 11 AM.

Zola finally seems satisfied when she's done with her banana. Meredith takes a good look at her. She's trying to chew on one measuring cup and she's got another in her other hand. She is still wearing just a diaper and the long-sleeved white t-shirt that she wore to bed. Zola doesn't seem concerned, but Meredith wants to dress her. It's just that they don't have much beyond what the hospital sent home. She's still in her pajamas too. She should try to get both herself and Zola dressed before Derek gets home, but she doesn't want to take the cups from her and make her cry again.

After awhile, Zola looks like she's tiring of the cups. Maybe this is a good time to take them away and try to get her changed at least. She tries to help Zola stand, holding her loosely under her armpits. Her knees buckle immediately. Meredith holds her up again, but Zola can't support herself.

Reality hits her hard; they have a baby with spina bifida. It won't be enough to be adequate for her; she really will need to do whatever it takes. She will need to be an extraordinary mother. She needs Derek for this part. Zola might not be able to walk. She needs Derek.

Zola smiles at Meredith. She's not worried about her legs, so Meredith tries to smile back. She keeps holding her upright. "Ok," she says quietly. "It's ok. Don't worry." Zola sinks down a little, but Meredith keeps a strong hold on her. She wants her to know what it feels like for her feet to be on the ground. "It's ok," she says again, more for herself than for Zola. "We'll figure it out. We'll get there. We just have to keep trying."

* * *

He comes home to a quiet house. Zola, Meredith tells him, has finally gone to sleep in the porta-crib, but they absolutely cannot keep it long-term because she hates it. Meredith is still in her pajamas, curled up on the couch even though it's nearly one in the afternoon.

"How was it?" she asks.

"I don't know."

He hates that it's not over yet, that he can't figure out how far this will have to go before it will finally _be_ over. Part of it isn't her fault; she can't control her genes and she didn't make him love her. But overwhelmingly, the mess they're in now is her fault. He hates this.

He wonders if she feels guilty now that she's had time to think and now that she was asked not to come to work today. She's stubborn but she has to feel it now, at least a little. How could she not feel it when it's all he can think about?

After a silence, she pulls her hair back into a ponytail and hands him a notepad from the coffee table. "I made a list," she says. "Or I tried to, anyway, of all the things we need for her. I may have forgotten some stuff. But there's a Babies 'R Us that's like 20 minutes away so maybe they can help."

The list is long and includes the obvious: crib, bedding, highchair, changing table, diapers, more bottles. Further down the list, she has written "non-orphanage clothes" and "real toys." He smiles; Zola must have gotten into something that Meredith would consider to be not a real toy this morning.

"I can help with this," he says, sitting down in the chair next to the couch with the list in hand. "I remember a lot from my nieces and nephews."

She gives him a look that he can't quite read. As well as he knows her, this is uncharted territory. He never had any doubt that she could gain competency in the area of taking care of a child and fulfilling their physical needs. He doesn't have doubts about her capacity to love a child either. What he's concerned about—what he's still angry about—is this ethical subjectivity that she, and only she, subscribes to.

"I'm not going to apologize because I've been around babies before," he says tiredly.

"I didn't ask you to. But I am not going to apologize because I haven't."

It doesn't always flare up; in fact, this dark and twisty part of her has shown itself less and less over the years. But when it does come back, it never fails to either piss him off or scare him to death. It's the part of her that reads into things too much, and makes them more complicated than they actually are. It's why she is angry now when all he is doing is trying to help.

He doesn't yet know what to say about the things he said yesterday. He doesn't really mean that he thinks she'll be a bad mother. Already, he knows that she has stepped up and done more than she ever thought herself capable of doing. But he's hurt and he's angry and he really does wonder how the hell they're going to do this. Neither of them are religious, but it's going to be like raising a child with two different belief systems. She doesn't think what she did was wrong, and he doesn't know how to get beyond that.

"Did Richard call you?" he asks.

"Yeah, a little while ago," she says. "I'm suspended without pay for two months."

"And you're fine with that?"

"It's pretty much what I was expecting, Derek. The Chief told me yesterday that he was going to suspend me."

It feels almost like he doesn't know her. This is the woman who has practically lived in the hospital for weeks at a time on more than one occasion. Her class of residents is one of the most competitive he's ever seen, and out of all of them, she and Cristina are at the head of the pack. She wants to be the best and now all of a sudden, she's taking a two-month break and it doesn't seem to bother her. Up until yesterday, everybody, she included, wanted a pristine record to try to get chief resident. A two-month suspension would have been a nail in the coffin.

"Did he tell you that the AMA is going to get involved?" he asks. He wonders if it's appropriate that he asks the question in such an accusatory way, but then he decides that it is.

"No, he didn't tell me that," Meredith says quietly.

"Did he tell you that you could have your license suspended or revoked?"

"I know what the AMA does."

"You don't seem that concerned about it."

Frankly, Richard is not good at this kind of thing. He should have known, based on how he has handled other ethical problems over the past few years. Richard talks a good game, but on the inside, he's soft. Maybe it's because deep down, he knows that he's done several dubious things himself over the years. But whatever the reason, when it's time to dish out punishment, he's never been heavy-handed. And when Meredith Grey is involved, well, he's putty.

"Of course I'm concerned about it!" she replies. "But what am I supposed to do? I did what I did, and I knew there would be consequences if someone found out. But I meant what I said yesterday. I would do it again."

"Meredith, the AMA doesn't give a damn about your personal relationship with the Chief of Surgery and why you did what you did," he says. "They don't care about the noble intentions you had. They could revoke your medical license! And then what?"

He's trying to be quiet because he doesn't want to wake Zola. He doesn't want her to ever have to hear him yell. But the problem with this is that Meredith _knows_ that Richard doesn't know how to handle her. She knows full well that most of the time when he looks at her, he sees the five-year-old child who used to get dragged around the hospital and shouted at and shifted from person to person. He thinks that he owes her something for that. Honestly, the husband in Derek thinks that Richard certainly does owe Meredith something. But the doctor in him knows that this cycle of blame and victimization has no place in a professional setting.

"I don't know, Derek."

"I don't know why you do this, Meredith." He throws up his hands and laughs a little at the absurdity of it all. "You just do things with no regard to the consequences, like everything will be fine. And it's not always fine, Meredith. You have no idea how damn lucky you are."

"Don't lecture me, Derek," she says angrily. "But for the record, you wanted to put Adele in the trial too. I'm not the only one."

"I wanted to put her in the trial, not destroy the whole damn thing to make sure she got the drug. I wanted to put her in the trial and give her the same shot as every other patient."

"And that was good enough for you?"

"Of course it wasn't good enough, but we don't get to decide what's good enough!" he cries. "There are millions of people with Alzheimer's. I'd like to give all of them the treatment if I could. But now I can't, because of you. Maybe we wouldn't have gotten it right this time, but we could have made progress. And then maybe one day there could be a cure for Alzheimer's. I meant what I said yesterday too. If you were focused on those people, on the millions of people who are suffering from this disease, then you wouldn't have done this."

"Derek, would you get off your fucking high horse?" she says angrily. "You're not focused on the millions of people with Alzheimer's; you want to fix me. There's something wrong with me that you need to fix. I thought we were past that, but I guess not."

She's always been good about calling him on his crap, but the way she says this now makes him feel terrible. He needs this trial, but he also hates it. Does she think he likes seeing what their lives might turn into? He swore on a post-it and then in front of a judge that he would love her in sickness and in health, for better or for worse. He promised that if she gets Alzheimer's and forgets him, that he will remind her who he is. But by promising these things, it doesn't mean that he wants them to happen. It doesn't mean that he has promised to avoid trying to prevent them if he can.

"I'm scared to death that you might get Alzheimer's," he says. "Is that so wrong?"

"No. I'm scared too. I wanted to find out, so we could know what we're in for. We can still do that."

"That won't make it better!" he says. "I don't want you to have Alzheimer's at all. I want you to be here."

She leans forward and puts her head in her hands for a second. She takes a deep breath, and when she looks up at him, she says, "Then you don't get to act like you're the only one who did anything for personal reasons in this trial."

"If anything, I did this for you," he says. "I did this for my wife. And I didn't do anything that could destroy my career. You did. And you did it for a man who…Meredith, you didn't even want him at our wedding!"

"Derek, I'm sorry that I hurt you. I am," she says. "But Adele was begging me to give her, her husband back. She thought I was my mother. I was trying to make it right. So you need to decide if you can live with that."

He believes her when she says she is sorry, but he isn't ready to accept the apology. There's still so much that's been lost and so much to be afraid of.

"Meredith," he replies. "It's not about whether or not I can live with this. My trial's gone down the drain. Your career might have gone with it. This is already done. But when you pull crap like this, I have to wonder when's the next time you're going to put your hand on a bomb. We have a baby now. You can't take these kinds of risks. Maybe you don't believe there are a right and a wrong, but in situations like these, there is. Because everybody else believes it. Because the FDA and the AMA believe it, and that's the way it goes."

"I can be her mother, Derek. I can't promise you anything about right and wrong. But if you think the worst thing about being raised by my mother was that she got Alzheimer's when she was in her fifties, you're wrong. So, I can promise you that I will do whatever it takes. I want her. And you're either on board or you're not."

She wipes tears out of her eyes. Even though she rarely cries, he hates it when she does. Trying to have a baby has been wearing her down, and she gets emotional much more quickly and frequently than she ever did before. This part of her is different from how she used to be; he never thought she would want a baby as badly as she does. He knows that this past year has broken both of their hearts. Maybe she's just tired, but maybe she has a different idea of where this fight is going than he does. He wants Zola too. He's not going to leave.

He tries to smile. They can figure this out later. Softly, gently, he asks, "Do you want to talk more about this list?"

* * *

When Zola wakes up, they put her in the car and drive to Babies 'R Us. List in hand, Meredith knows that she has to be forgetting a million things, so her plan is to just walk up and down every aisle and look at everything, regardless of whether it made the original list or not.

She has no idea what she's doing. There's no point in trying to avoid that. Common sense has gotten her as far as she can probably expect it to, and a lot of this is going to be a trial by fire situation. Slowly, she's trying to accept that that's ok, that Zola doesn't know any better and by the time she does, they'll have it together.

In her entire life, this has never crossed her mind before this moment, but she wonders who did this kind of thing for her. Surely, before she was born, Ellis and Thatcher must have realized that the baby would need things. Who made sure that there was a crib ready for her? Did they spend time choosing the right kind of bedding, the way she and Derek were now? Did Ellis read _Your Baby's First Year?_

Zola sits in the seat at the front of the cart while Derek pushes it up and down the aisles. She walks alongside the cart, holding the list and a sandwich baggie of Cheerios in one hand, and pulling items from the list off the shelves with the other hand. Every few paces, she slips a Cheerio into Zola's mouth, which seems to be keeping her happy for the time being.

They're 20 minutes into the trip when she realizes that they're going to need to make a return trip soon. Their cart is almost full and they're barely halfway through the store. It's overwhelming that there could be a superstore dedicated to babies. Half the cart is taken up by things she didn't even know existed, like bottle cleaning brushes (which come in four different colors) and teething toys that are shaped like jungle animals.

"Do you think she would like this?" she asks, holding up a package containing a set of crib bedding with blue and green paisley birds and trees. "It's girly but not too girly. I don't want her room to be like an explosion of pink."

"Zola, what do you think?" Derek asks, but she's too busy waiting for her next Cheerio to pay much attention to the bedding.

They decide to go with the paisley bird bedding. Even though she can tell that Derek wants Zola to be a daddy's girl, he agrees that they don't need too much pink crap for her.

There's not as much time to linger in the store and agonize over which furniture set they should choose and what pattern of fabric should be covering the boppy pillow. It takes enough time to learn what a boppy pillow is and to figure out how much furniture they can even fit in their house right now, let alone make any of the other more cosmetic decisions. It quickly becomes apparent that they will probably have to do most of this again once they're actually ready to move. She shifts her attention to thinking of this trip as more of a stop-gap.

This is kind of like how she thought it would be. Of course, Zola starts crying after awhile and no longer wants to sit in the cart, but that's manageable. They're not fighting. There are moments where she forgets they ever were and that there are still things that they must sort out. For now, this just feels nice. When she tosses a few packs of white onesies into the cart, she thinks back to Callie's baby shower and feels relief. And when Zola stops crying when she holds her, it makes her so happy that she could bust.

* * *

After 45 minutes, they've already let a sales associate take one full cart to the front of the store for safe-keeping. Now on cart number two, they're slowing down a little, but they still have a few aisles to go through before he will feel safe leaving the store. He agrees with Meredith—they're going to have to come back—but he never realized how much stuff they would need until he found himself surrounded by all of it.

He has no idea that there are so many different kinds of strollers. Of course he has seen them before. As someone who both is conscious and has been a pedestrian in a suburb or city, he realizes that strollers are everywhere, but now that they actually have to buy one, he's at a loss.

"Which one do you think she would like?" he asks.

"Well," Meredith says slowly, scanning the obscene number of choices. "She has to ride in it, so how about a test drive? Do you want to take a test drive, Zola?" she asks the baby in her arms. "Let's try that one," she says, pointing to a basic black stroller with a tray and a padded seat. "Can you grab it?"

He takes the model stroller off the shelf, and Meredith buckles Zola in. "What do you think, Zola?" she asks, squatting down in front of the baby. "Do you like it?" Zola grins.

She pushes it up the aisle a bit and stops. "It handles well," she says. "You try."

He leaves the cart and takes the reins on the stroller, pushing Zola back towards Meredith. "Do you like it?" she asks Zola again. Her voice gets softer, and a little higher, when she talks to Zola. He doesn't think she even realizes.

She feels the fabric of the stroller's seat and says, "This is practically nicer than my car. If you have no complaints, Zola," she says as she unbuckles her, "I think we can go with this one. Is that ok?" she asks him.

"Fine by me," he replies. He puts the model stroller back and takes a ticket so they can pick it up with the rest of their big equipment purchases when they're ready to leave.

The next aisle is dedicated to walkers, swings, bouncers, jumpers, and playsets. So far, she's walked a little bit ahead of him, but when she sees this stuff, she turns around to face him.

"I don't know what to get for her," she says quietly.

He looks at the pictures on the boxes of babies using this stuff. They scoot around hardwood floors with their delighted parents following closely behind, or they bounce in a harness suspended from a doorway, or they stand to push the buttons of a musical tabletop set.

Zola has already had spinal surgery and brain surgery. But she can move her legs.

"We're going to get all of it, ok?" he says. "She will use it."

Meredith nods and snuggles Zola a little closer. She tickles Zola's side, and Zola giggles and then gives a full-on belly laugh when Meredith does it again. Zola tosses her head back and shrieks happily, and he's never seen Meredith smile quite like she is now. His heart floods with joy.


	3. Chapter 3

_And now I cling to what I knew  
I saw exactly what was true  
But oh, no more.  
That's why I hold,  
That's why I hold with all I have,  
_ _That's why I hold._

A week after everything with the clinical trial came to light, Meredith returns to the hospital knowing that everything is different. She's got a baby in her arms this time, it's the middle of the day, she's alone, and she is not allowed to work.

Derek has taken three personal days since Zola came home. She knows it's not nearly as many as he would have liked to take, but dealing with the fallout from the clinical trial's implosion has forced him into the hospital this week whether he likes it or not. They don't talk about it. At this point, she knows there's nothing that she can say that hasn't already been said and nothing that he wants to hear that, coming from her, wouldn't be a lie. It is what it is.

One of the unexpected results of Derek being away so much is that she has grown completely accustomed to talking at full volume to a seven-month-old who responds only with babble. During Zola's naps, she's been reading about adopting internationally and promoting language acquisition. Apparently, you're supposed to talk a lot, and not necessarily in a baby voice, which actually works out nicely since she tends to not do well with silence and baby talk always seemed like a bit of a stretch. It's part of the reason why she feels not the least bit self-conscious talking to Zola while walking through the lobby of the hospital.

"Do you remember this place?" she asks. "We were going to put you in daycare here, but it looks like I'm going to be home for a little bit so that won't happen right away. But that'll be good, right? To hang out with me at home?"

She doesn't yet know what she's going to do to fill up the time. Right now, it seems like a lot to just keep Zola fed, clean, entertained, and on a reasonable sleeping schedule and to keep herself showered and feeling like a human being. With Derek at work, she's been making a lot of calls to their contractor and to plumbers and electricians. They need to get this house moving along before their next visit with the social worker, and it feels like everything is moving way too slowly. Still, even though she tries to play with Zola while she talks, Zola stares up at her, and she knows that it's not the most interesting thing in the world. She expects that it's not very mom-like, and that there are other things she needs to be doing with her.

"I'm going to try not to make it so boring for you," she says.

She makes it a point to use the first person in front of Zola. She doesn't know how Zola thinks of her. If her frequent laughter is any indication, Meredith's best guess is that Zola thinks she is a lovable moron. But it's not like she has sat Zola down and explained that they are trying to adopt her, and it might take a long time, but if all goes well, they will be a family. It's not like Zola has asked to call her 'Mommy,' and she doesn't know if she is supposed to offer this choice to a seven-month-old. This part is more complicated than it would be if she had given birth to Zola. It's not worse; it's just less automatic. There's so much up in the air, so even though she feels like her baby, she doesn't want it to be confusing at best, or heartbreaking at worst.

Derek doesn't seem to feel this way. He took to Zola immediately. He already thinks of himself as Daddy, and has no apparent qualms about referring to himself as such. She wonders if his love for Zola feels different than her love does, because, without a frame of reference to work from, she's pretty sure this is what it's supposed to feel like.

It's confusing, but she doesn't bring it up to Derek. He hasn't said anything more about their confrontation in the residents' locker room, and what he said to her. The more time goes by, the more she gets scared that he really might believe what he said. With everything that's happened, and with everything that's changed over the past week, she hasn't had much time to dwell on it. Zola's here, and she's trying for her, and if it's not working, Zola doesn't seem to know or care because she laughs all the time.

Derek smiles when he sees the two of them together, like last night when he came home from work and Zola was trying to share her food with her, passing a handful of applesauce to her with chubby hands. But he hasn't said anything, and in the rare moments when she has time to think, it bothers her. When she couples his silence with this worry she has over whether Zola thinks of her as her mom and whether she thinks of herself that way, she realizes that she can't say anything. It might not be normal, and if it's not, he can't know about it. She doesn't want to confirm his worst fears until she knows what she's dealing with.

It's rare to be the only ones on an elevator in this hospital, but she and Zola are as they make their way to the fourth floor. She still has the AMA looming over her head, but that meeting isn't until next week, and she's found that she only has room for so many things in her head at one time. Right now, the AMA just doesn't fit. Today, they're meeting Derek, and then taking Zola to the private practice across the street from the hospital for a check-up with the pediatrician.

It feels like everyone is staring at her when she walks down the halls towards Derek's office. It's not surprising—this kind of staring has happened before—but it's disconcerting nonetheless the way that nobody speaks to her, like they can catch self-destruction from her. It's enough to make her stop talking. Zola's babbling cuts through the chatter until it's the only thing she can hear.

The pediatrician they're using comes with high accolades from Callie, Arizona, and Mark. Harry Buchanan is a genial middle-aged guy, ten years older than Derek but looks twenty years older. He is wonderful with Zola; he makes her laugh a few times and is so gentle that the three of them completely relax.

When he starts talking about Zola's spina bifida, it has the effect of dumping a bucket of ice water over Meredith's head. Derek holds Zola, who turns around and grabs at his chin, while they talk. It's not like Dr. Buchanan is telling them anything they don't know. But they need to find a neurologist, a physical therapist, an orthotist, and maybe an occupational therapist. The enormity of how they're going to do all this weighs on her. Derek starts rattling off names of colleagues to see what Dr. Buchanan thinks of them, and rehashes the results of all of Zola's collective neuro exams. They seem to agree that with intensive therapy and a bit of luck, Zola might be able to walk with the assistance of leg braces and a walker by the time she's two, but there will be no way to know about bladder and bowel control until around they would normally try to start potty training her.

"Ok, so we've got a couple of routine vaccinations today," Dr. Buchanan says when the discussion wraps up. They both stand up and Derek shifts Zola to his hip.

"We're doing RV, DTaP, HiB, and PCV. I promise, I'll try to make it quick and painless. We'll do two in the left thigh and two in the right. Is that ok?"

Meredith nods, but Derek verbalizes that that sounds fine.

"All right, let's go ahead and lay her down on the table," the doctor says. Zola's already stripped down to just her diaper for the exam, and she doesn't mind when Derek sets her down. Dr. Buchanan takes a moment to get all of the syringes ready and then says, "If you want to hold her so she doesn't squirm, that'd be great."

Derek holds her shoulders, and Meredith cups both hands around Zola's ankles. Held down, Zola's mood shifts. She looks around and almost immediately, she starts to fidget.

"Ok, Zola, here we go, sweetie," he says, wiping some rubbing alcohol on her left leg first, and then her right.

When he injects the first syringe into her left leg, Zola screams. It's a different kind of cry than any of the ones Meredith has heard so far. It's not "I'm hungry" or "I'm wet" or "I'm bored." She's very clearly shocked and in pain. The three other syringes follow in quick succession, and Zola's screams get louder.

Meredith looks at Derek, who is helplessly holding Zola's shoulders while she tries to squirm. It takes a much bigger effort than it did just a few seconds ago to keep holding her ankles while Dr. Buchanan finishes with the vaccinations.

"It's ok, it's ok," Meredith keeps repeating. "I'm sorry." Dr. Buchanan disposes of the syringes in the sharps container. "Is she done?" Meredith asks.

"She's all set," Dr. Buchanan says calmly. "She did great."

Derek lets go of her immediately, and Meredith pulls Zola into her arms. Zola's still crying, hopefully more from shock than pain by now. Meredith pats her back. She feels warm and flushed, and Zola grabs for Meredith's hair.

"Derek, where's her pacifier?" she asks. Derek fumbles for it in their diaper bag, and when he passes it to Meredith, she offers it to Zola, who promptly spits it out. "Shhh, it's ok, Zola," she says. "You're ok. I'm right here."

Zola cries so hard that there are moments of hiccupping quiet followed by a deep breath and a scream. It feels like it goes on and on, and Meredith's eyes fill with tears. When Zola puts her head on Meredith's shoulder and tightly grips her shirt, Meredith feels helpless, but she doesn't have time to worry about what it looks like now that her own tears are rolling down her cheeks. She tries the pacifier again, and Zola takes it. With another minute or two of patting her back and shushing her, Zola calms down.

Dr. Buchanan lets them know that if she runs a fever later or seems cranky, they can give her a dose of children's Tylenol. They need to make another appointment in two months for a follow-up, and they can do that at the front desk.

While Derek gets Zola's clothes together, Meredith sits down with Zola. With her free hand, she wipes tears out of her eyes.

Dr. Buchanan smiles. "I've been doing this for 25 years," he assures her. "It's always worse for the moms than it is for the babies."

* * *

Two weeks to the day after they bring Zola home, Derek starts literally calling in favors. After their conversation with the pediatrician, he asks around and it turns out that doctors at Seattle Grace-Mercy West are pretty backed up. It will take some time—only a month or so, but still, longer than he's willing to wait—before they can have the appropriate medical professionals begin seeing Zola regularly.

Up until now, he's referred plenty of his own patients to the hospital's PT program, but now that it's his daughter who needs help and now that it's going to take a few weeks, he wants to make sure that they really are the best.

He makes all the calls from his office because he doesn't want to worry Meredith, who seems to get nervous and quiet whenever spina bifida comes up in conversation. It's already nearly lunchtime on the East Coast, so he starts with the neurologist he used to work with often when he had a private practice in New York. He hasn't talked to the guy in years, and has to Google his phone number, but he trusts Adam Lee to tell it to him straight. Fortunately, Dr. Lee takes his call right away.

"Well," he says, after they've gotten all the pleasantries and explanations out of the way, "Without seeing her test results or examining her myself, I'd say that your pediatrician is probably right. She has a decent chance of walking, at least some of the time. But I'm not going to lie to you, Derek. It's not what you called me for, and you'd know I was lying to you anyway. It's going to be a lot of work, for the baby and for you and your wife."

The work involved doesn't seem very important; in fact, Derek's pretty sure he's missed at least a few words while he allowed himself a moment to savor the idea that she will hopefully be able to walk at least some of the time.

"She's going to need physical therapy, and you need to have an orthopedist and an orthicist look at her to see if she could use some leg braces. Maybe OT, but that depends. You're going to have to watch her. Look for signs of a tethered cord, shunt malfunctions…but you know the signs for those things. And you know how to cath her if she winds up having bladder issues, right?"

"I haven't put someone's catheter in since I was a resident, but yeah, I know how to do it," he says. He's trying to take notes and talk at the same time, which is harder than it looks.

"Honestly, you're better off than most parents who have a kid with spina bifida," Dr. Lee says. "Half the battle is trying to help the parents understand the condition and what they have to do to help the kid live as normal a life as possible. A couple of brain surgeons have a higher baseline than that. You guys know spina bifida."

Yeah, but not this side of it, Derek wants to say, but doesn't. He can delicately tuck in an exposed sac of nerves, and put in a shunt to drain fluid from the skull, but beyond that, his involvement with spina bifida stops. He discharges patients, refers them to PT, and generally never sees them again. He's good at what he does, but that's all he knows how to do. And that part, for Zola, is already done. Now, his baseline is pretty much where every other parent's is.

"Do you know anybody on the West Coast?" Derek asks.

"Any spina bifida specialists? I know a guy at UCLA, but that's not going to do you much good."

"Well, we could take her down there," Derek offers. "It's a short flight."

"Every two-three months?" Dr. Lee shoots back. "You need somebody local, Derek. Don't you have anybody where you work?"

"I want to make sure she gets the best."

"She's no longer a surgical case, right?"

"No, not right now. Not unless something happens."

"Then you need somebody closer to home. If it turns out that she might need more surgery, I'll absolutely refer you to my guy at UCLA. But we're talking PT appointments once or twice a week, not to mention the PT that you and your wife will need to do at home with her every day. She might need OT once a week when she gets older, and she's going to outgrow those leg braces and need new ones what'll feel like every day—trust me, you want to get a team together in Seattle."

"How long do you think we're talking here?" Derek asks.

"Years, Derek."

Derek talks a good game. He always has. When your dad gets shot in the head in front of you when you're a fifteen year old kid, you learn how to do that quickly. The alternative is to get swallowed up in worry and grief and uncertainty, which doesn't help a damn thing. It's best, as he's learned over the years, to fake it 'til you make it. He and Meredith have that in common. The only difference between them is that he's good enough at it that, if he doesn't think too much about it, he believes that the confident, borderline-cocky, veneer actually is his real self whereas Meredith is always shaky on the inside. Conversations like this one make him realize why.

* * *

Now that Zola has been home for exactly two weeks, Janet is coming over for a follow-up meeting this evening. Derek is at work, which kind of pisses Meredith off. Between this meeting tonight, and her meeting with the AMA tomorrow, her entire life could easily unravel in a span of 24 hours.

It's only noon, but he has already called twice. The first time, he calls to see if Meredith thinks they should cook Janet dinner. She tells him that they'll take the baby away if Janet tastes her cooking, so he better pick up take-out on the way home. The second time, he calls to tell her that he sweet-talked the head of PT into squeezing Zola in for her first appointment next week and that he's bringing home a list of exercises they can start doing with her at home. He hasn't said a single word about the AMA meeting tomorrow.

While she feeds Zola lunch, Meredith tries to make a mental list of what needs to be done before Janet gets here at 6:00. She's already put the word out to everybody else to make themselves scarce until at least nine; they've already shown Janet a pile of lumber and nails and they don't need to show her another disaster this time. The house is fairly clean, thanks to April and Lexie, but it wouldn't hurt to vacuum or whatever if she can figure out how to do it without scaring the crap out of Zola again.

She stirs a plastic-coated baby spoon around in a half-empty jar of pureed green beans, and spoons some into Zola's waiting mouth. Zola hums and opens her mouth for more as soon as she swallows. Since she's come home, Meredith's kind of gotten her into a routine where she has a bottle at 10 AM, but by lunchtime, she's always ravenous.

Meredith gives Zola another bite and tries to work herself up to doing the one major thing that she wants to take care of before Janet gets here tonight. She hasn't said a thing about it to anyone. Cristina hasn't been around much in the past two weeks, not that Meredith can really blame her, but still. Cristina can't listen, and that's tough because she's not comfortable showing this vulnerability to anyone else, not even Derek right now. Even so, she thinks she's got it pretty much figured out on her own, but it's just a matter of working up the courage to say it.

Zola's head has turned to look out the window, even though her mouth is still agape, waiting for the next bite of food. She's wearing a corny bib from Lexie that says "Give peas a chance," no pants, and a Yankees t-shirt that Derek ordered online, which finally arrived two days ago.

"Zola," Meredith says. "Zola, look."

Zola responds to her name, and accepts when Meredith offers her another spoonful of food.

"So Janet is coming over tonight," Meredith says aloud. She has no way of knowing for sure, but she swears Zola pays attention when she talks, at least most of the time.

"Do you remember Janet?" she asks. Zola stares at her, takes another bite from Meredith, but says nothing. Of course, she's not saying any words yet, but sometimes she babbles and Meredith feels like Zola gets her point across well enough most of the time.

"Well, she's the one who is helping us out with you. Remember how I said that we're hoping that you get to stay here? She's coming over tonight to check on you and see how you're doing. I think it'll go ok, don't you? You seem to be doing well, right?"

Zola seems to have learned that the higher intonation at the end of a sentence means that she should respond. She babbles for a second, and opens and closes her mouth a few times, smacking her lips as if to remind Meredith that she is still hungry.

Meredith gives her another bite, and makes herself keep talking. "We're going to start doing physical therapy this week," she says. "That's part of what he said when he called. We'll have some ideas of what to do for you, so that'll be good."

She's over-reliant on pronouns, and she knows that Zola has no idea who she is talking about when she says 'he.' But it feels weird to say 'Daddy,' even though Derek says it all the time, and wrong to say 'Derek,' because Derek doesn't call himself that.

Zola finishes her green beans and Meredith takes a break to microwave some leftover mini rotini pasta. She gives it a few seconds for it to cool, and then puts a handful of the noodles on Zola's tray for her to pick up on her own.

"So everything is hopefully taking another step forward today. I know we don't really do this—well, _I_ don't really do this—but I really want to be your mommy. So, I was thinking that you can call me that, if you want. I can just be Mommy now instead of…whatever I was before. Would that be something you want?"

Zola stares at her but then launches into a long monologue of repeated syllables that ends with her grabbing at her noodles and putting two of them in her mouth.

"Chew," Meredith reminds her, and mimics the action. "Chew."

Zola chews as best she can with her now-three teeth. She reaches for another noodle without paying much attention to Meredith.

She doesn't want to beleaguer the point, especially with a baby who probably has no idea what she's even asking in the first place, but she can't help it. "Do you want me to be your Mommy?" she asks.

Zola must think she's ridiculous because she laughs, and grabs for one of her noodles, holding it out to Meredith in what Meredith has to believe is delighted acquiescence.

When Zola goes down for her nap, Meredith tries to clean up a little and get ready for Janet's visit. It's not like Zola really said anything, and maybe that wasn't the point. She's the one who needed to talk, and she finally had. She feels proud of herself, and in control. But then she realizes that the only place to store what needs to be hidden—the alcohol, the back issues of US Weekly that somehow pile up in the living room, the unopened mail that has never found a place, and even the chair with the slightly torn upholstery—is Alex's empty bedroom, some of that elation slips quickly away.

* * *

They ace their second home study. The credit, he knows, goes to Meredith, who has done the lion's share of the work. They are supposed to hear from Janet again in a few days to talk about next steps, but for now, everything feels stable and safe.

"I think that went really well," he tells Meredith while they're cleaning up dinner and putting Zola's stuff away. It's almost nine and no one has come home yet, so either it's a busy night at the hospital or Meredith put the fear of God into her friends.

Janet doesn't wind up eating with them, but between Zola's dishes and bottles and their own things, they have a sink full of dishes that need to go in the dishwasher.

"I think so," she replies.

She's wearing his mother's ring for the first time, and even though he knows it's only for the home study, he likes it.

"I didn't get a chance to show you earlier," he says when he finishes with the dishes. "I talked to Kittredge in PT this afternoon and she gave me some stuff about exercises that we need to do with her at home, but I am kind of reluctant to do them until I see what they're supposed to be. You know what I mean?"

"I think that's ok," she replies. They sit down at the kitchen counter and Meredith picks up a thinly-packed manila folder. "Is this them?"

He nods, and shows her diagrams of several exercises meant to strengthen Zola's limbs and core.

"They look simple enough," Meredith says. "What time is her appointment on Monday?"

"I made it for 10:00. Is that ok?" he asks. "I figured that would be enough time to get her home for lunch and a nap. That seems like it fits into her schedule."

"Yeah, well, we're working on it," she says.

"You're doing a great job."

He means it when he says it, even though he knows he hasn't said it enough. If he's being honest, he's completely overwhelmed with how quickly their lives have completely changed. He's trying to keep his head above water, but she seems to be taking it in stride. Selfishly, he thinks that she doesn't have work to worry about, but then he reminds himself that, arguably, she's got more to stress over about work than he does.

She says thank you, but nothing else. They've never talked about what he said in the residents' lounge two weeks ago, and he's bad at apologizing. He wants to, but he doesn't want it to seem like a vote of confidence now that she's proven herself to be capable. It's not that at all; he's regretted it since the first night, but exhaustion, stress, anger, and pride have conspired to keep him quiet.

"How do you want to do this?" he asks.

"What?"

"Her schedule. She won't know for sure until she sees her, but Kittredge said she'll probably need PT once a week, plus home exercises, regular neuro appointments, maybe OT. It'll probably be a couple appointments a month for the first few years, at least. Are you comfortable doing that?"

"Yeah, for the first two months," she says. "We're going to have to figure something else out though. Do you think you can reduce your hours?"

"I can," he agrees.

He's been waiting for Zola for fifteen years. With Meredith at the hospital just as much, if not more, than he was, there was no reason not to work all the time. But now that someone is waiting on him at home, he makes sure that he gets to her as soon as he can. It doesn't much matter that spina bifida is a major prompt for this conversation; she deserves as much of his time as he can give regardless.

"What about you?" he asks.

Meredith sighs and rubs at her cheekbones. "I have residency to catch up on," she says. She sounds worried, but not exasperated. This might be the first time she has said these words, but he knows that they have been grappled with for weeks. "It'll be tight for the first few months at least, but I can try to sneak away for at least some of the appointments."

"You really think you're going to get your job back?"

The words are out of his mouth and in the open before he even realizes that he's saying them. She looks like she's just been slapped. It's a moment before she speaks again.

"Yes, I do."

He sighs and shakes his head. He doesn't want to be the heavy here, but though he has known her to be a realist, maybe even a bit optimistic, he is shocked by her assessment of the situation.

"You won't, Meredith. Not after this."

"You don't know that."

"You're meeting with the AMA tomorrow," he says. "That's serious."

"I know. And I am taking my punishment, and will continue to do so."

"Well, your punishment is probably going to be you losing your job. You'll be _lucky_ if you only lose your job over this."

He doesn't mean to be harsh. And he certainly cannot look at the situation objectively. In what he believes could be Richard's most hypocritical move to date, the Chief has asked him to please turn all of the requested information over to the FDA and AMA, but to do nothing more because he would take care of it from there. He hasn't seen Cristina or Alex since all of this happened, and he believes he might be the only one left who is willing to tell it to her straight.

"If I lose my job, I'll get another one," she says. He can't tell if she's being defiant or naïve. "I'm still a surgeon, Derek."

He shakes his head like it's about to explode. He can't fathom her line of thinking; it's almost surreal how she thinks she can escape this, but then again, everyone who has done wrong at this hospital—himself included—has rarely been punished. He supposes that if anyone can do it, Meredith Grey can escape this scot-free. He's not sure if he wants her to, but he keeps that part to himself.

"Ok, let's say you do go back to work," he says. The words feel caustic and foreign as they come out of his mouth, but he doesn't stop to check them. "What happens then?"

"Zola's going to go to daycare like we've talked about a million times."

It's on the fifth floor. Tuck loved it until he began preschool last fall; Sofia will start going there soon. They offer flexible hours and accessibility to Zola at anytime that other facilities just would not be able to match. They have talked about it a million times.

"She needs PT every day," he says.

"So we'll do PT every day," Meredith says. "We can do it in the morning when she wakes up and before bed. Derek, what did you think was going to happen?"

It's not really a fair question, since what he thought was going to happen was thrown out entirely three weeks ago. He hasn't had time to reassess. "I don't know," he says.

"Did you really think I wasn't going back to work ever again?"

In truth, he hasn't given it much thought. Their current situation hasn't forced him to. Now that he's being prompted, he can't imagine what Meredith would do if she wasn't a surgeon. But he also can't fathom how they will negotiate two work-weeks that regularly exceed a typical 9-5 job by at least 20 hours a week. It's something that she worried about over a month ago, during Zola's hernia surgery, and he told her that everything would be ok. Now, suddenly, he feels foolish for not considering these hardships a bit more seriously.

"I don't know what I thought," he says after a beat.

"Did you really think that I would ever let her go without the things that she needs?" Meredith asks.

"Of course not," he replies, this time more immediately.

Meredith sits back in her chair like she has just finished an interrogation and has finally cracked her witness. "So I guess I did a good enough job so far. Did I pass the test?"

When Zola is not around, it seems like Meredith divides her time equally between anger and sadness. When they talk, he can tell that sometimes it takes everything out of her not to snap at him, and often, she gets teary without prompting. He knows that she is carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders, but so is he, so he can't help but ask:

"Why do you get so mad at me all the time?"

The tears pool in her eyes quickly this time, and she looks away for a second to try to collect herself before she speaks. It doesn't work as well as she probably would have hoped, but she talks anyway.

"When two weeks ago you told me you didn't even want to raise a baby with me because I'm a liability, and now you're planning on me staying home 24/7," she says. "I love Zola, Derek, but I'm planning on going back to work. If it's not at Seattle Grace, I'm going to find a job somewhere else. I will absolutely keep her with me until then, but that doesn't mean we don't need to think long-term. Both of our lives are going to change, not just mine. It's more than taking her to appointments. It's a lot more than that."

"I know," he replies.

She holds her head in her hands, and presses her fingertips to her closed eyes. Her shoulders shake silently for a second before she takes a deep breath. "I don't think I'm a bad mother," she says in a steely way, like she's expecting a challenge.

It's the first time he's heard her call herself a mother. He hates that it's happened like this. Suddenly, he sees how far he's pushed her and it makes him sick. Suddenly, saying sorry doesn't seem so hard; it pours out three times before she stops him.

Looking at him with red-rimmed eyes, she says, "I know you're sorry. I need to know if you believe what you said that day."

He leans forward in his chair and sighs. "I'm never going to agree with what you did to the trial. I just can't, Meredith," he says. "But I've wanted a baby with you for…years. I'm not going to give that up."

"That's not what I asked, Derek. Do you think I'm going to be a bad mother?"

He thinks about two nights ago, when he came home from work to find Zola in a few inches of water in the bathtub with Meredith kneeling by its side. Five or six disposable red plastic cups were floating abandoned on the surface of the soapy water, and Meredith had her own glass of ice water sitting on the floor next to the tub. He could hear Zola shriek with laughter before he actually saw her, and he smiled when he opened the bathroom door just in time to see Meredith spit a stream of water against the backsplash of the tub to Zola's delight.

"No," he says. "I don't. You love her. I never doubted that you would."

Meredith shakes her head. "Do you think I'm going to be a bad mother because of what I did to your trial?"

The answer's there now, and it's easy to say no. Even though he's seen her with Zola for weeks, he realizes that he's known this all along. "Meredith," he says, "You're going to raise Zola to be caring and compassionate and smart and funny. There's nobody else I'd want to raise a child with. I shouldn't have said what I said. I hate that I hurt you when I'm angry. I'm sorry."

Meredith nods but says nothing for a long while. He spends some time sitting there with her, and is about to get up and suggest they go to bed when she speaks.

"I told her that she can call me Mommy today," she says quietly, proudly.

He smiles as he imagines the conversation. "Did she?"

"No," Meredith laughs. "But I can't wait until she calls me that."

"Me too."

* * *

The next day, the AMA suspends Meredith's medical license for six months, and puts her on probation for five years following the suspension. Walking out of the hospital, she feels naked, like a critical part of her identity has been taken away and that there is a pox on her record that will stay there forever. In reality, she knows it could have been a lot worse, and if she's being honest with herself, she didn't really think through the potential consequences of her actions to this degree.

There's nothing to be done about it now. She still technically has her job, but she is suspended for another five weeks and her chances for being reinstated have now taken a turn for the worse.

She is in limbo between the old self that she knows so well and has tried for years to escape, and the new self which she is not yet. She's not walking out of the hospital and directly into the bar. But she's not laying out her options and beginning a job search right away like Cristina, or George, or the mother of a seven-month-old child, would.

If her mother could see her now. This is probably not the extraordinary future she imagined for her five-year-old right before she slit her wrists in front of her. The news will be all over the hospital by the end of the day, and because of the nature of the trial and what it could have meant, her disgrace will probably circulate through the neurosurgical field in the coming weeks when the results of the much-anticipated trial from Dr. Shepherd are never published. It's childish to think that it hasn't felt like a failure until now.

Callie, who has the day off, is watching both Zola and Sofia at Mark's urging, so Meredith really has nowhere she needs to be. For a moment, she thinks about going upstairs to tell Derek what has happened, but then thinks that maybe it will be better to collect her thoughts about the situation before Derek has a chance to offer his opinion. Without revisiting the subject often, it appears that they have agreed to disagree about what she's done, and she would prefer to not bring it up again for fear of regurgitating the same betrayals. Now, she knows she will have to, but it doesn't have to be right now.

She sits down on the bench outside the hospital, the same one where she held Derek's hand and asked if he was all right, the same one where she told Alex to go marry Izzie. Those things feel like they happened two lifetimes ago, and she wonders if Alex will ever come home and if Derek will ask her if she is ok when she tells him about all of this.

Nobody comes out to the bench to sit with her. It seems, these days, that everyone is so wrapped up in their own lives and their own problems—more so than usual. To be fair, she is guilty to some degree too. Her caregiving energy is expended totally on Zola; she isn't sure how to deal with Cristina's abortion or how to fix things with Alex. She doesn't know if she will ever understand what to do.

After a few minutes, she walks away from the hospital. Derek is upstairs, waiting to hear the verdict, but right now, this hospital does not belong to her. She expects the cravings to set in soon, the desires to work and to perform that are strong enough to withstand extreme sleep deprivation and a thousand petty grievances. She will have to find a way back in; there has to be one somewhere, or somehow. But for now, the only thing that makes walking away from the hospital less painful is the knowledge that she is walking towards Zola.


	4. Chapter 4

_And I took you by the hand  
And we stood tall,  
And remembered our own land,  
What we live for.  
_ _And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears._   
_And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears._

* * *

One hazy afternoon in the middle of the summer, Cristina knocks on Meredith and Derek's front door. She's carrying a box of Meredith's things in her arms and the expression on her face suggests that she's not so sure about this, but that it's too late to go back now.

"Hey," Cristina says, almost helplessly.

Her tone takes Meredith aback. Standing before her is the woman who, for years, felt comfortable enough to barge into her bedroom and get in bed with her and her husband. Now Cristina— _Cristina,_ of all people—seems like she's afraid to come inside. For a fleeting, but very real moment, Meredith wonders, for what feels like the millionth time, how the hell she wound up here.

"Hi."

"I brought you some of your stuff from your locker. I didn't know when you'd be coming back."

Meredith sighs. They haven't really talked much since everything happened with the trial. She's disgusted enough with all of it that she didn't need Cristina's shock added to it. But now that Cristina's at her doorstep, she realizes just how long it's been. It's funny how two and a half weeks seems like an eternity.

"I don't know when I'm coming back either," Meredith says quietly. She steps aside, and Cristina comes into the hallway. She presses the box into Meredith's arms. Inside, she can see her extra lab coat, a spare pair of scrubs, a coffee thermos, and a stack of loose papers and back issues of medical journals. It seems like Cristina has left all of her photos in her locker; she doesn't know whether that makes her feel better or worse, more or less hopeful that one day she can come back. She didn't know it was possible for the weight of her broken career to feel more real, or heavier, but somehow it does.

"Derek could have gotten this stuff for me," she says quietly.

"Oh."

Cristina looks down at the floor, and immediately, Meredith tries to backtrack. She wonders at how easy it is to take back the things that she really doesn't mean.

"No, it's just—." She puts the box of her things on the table by the door, and then says more firmly, "I'm glad you're here."

They don't say anything for a moment or two, but when they sit down on the living room couch, Meredith watches Cristina look around the room. She hasn't left the house all that much for a few weeks, so to her, it doesn't seem that different, but, looking at it through Cristina's eyes, she can see the changes. One of Zola's bottles is sitting on the coffee table, and her pajamas from last night are crumpled in a ball next to them. Her high chair in the kitchen is easily visible from where they're sitting, and some of her toys are in the corner of the room. It's a far cry from the tequila and the trashy magazines and the condoms that used to be out in plain sight.

"I had an abortion," Cristina says.

When she thinks about it too much—and maybe this is only because she's thinking about it in the wrong way—it hurts her a little bit. It's seems unjust; Cristina has one freaking fallopian tube, and she doesn't even _want_ a baby, and somehow, she got another chance to have one. First, she wonders if Cristina might feel differently if she found out, in retrospect, that there would be no more chances. And then she wonders why it seems like neither of them can get what they want. But then she remembers.

"I had a baby."

Cristina nods. "Is it ok that I'm here?"

"Yeah," Meredith replies. When did it become wrong to want something different from someone else? "Are you ok?" she asks.

Cristina sighs, and for the first time, Meredith notices how tired she looks.

"Owen is—I don't know—beside himself," she says. "We're not talking about it."

"Derek and I haven't talked much about the clinical trial either."

"It's done," Cristina says simply.

She thought she wanted to talk about it, but now she realizes that all she wanted was someone to understand what it was like.

"Yeah."

"Can I meet Zola?" Cristina asks after another moment of silence.

"You want to?"

"She's yours, isn't she?"

Meredith smiles. This, she feels like she can say with certainty, is true. "Yeah, she is."

"Then I want to."

Zola is sleeping right now, but Meredith promises that when she wakes up, she will introduce them. In the meantime, she asks how the hospital is.

"April has no freaking idea what she's doing. Remember when Callie was chief for awhile? It's like that, except worse."

"How is it worse?"

"Bailey's not picking up the slack."

Cristina sighs, and Meredith can imagine that the injustice of April being named chief still must rankle almost every other surgical resident in the hospital. She tries not to think how close she came to having the job herself.

"How's Alex?" she makes herself ask. This seems to be an easier topic for Cristina to talk about, even though it's harder for her to hear.

"He's back to being a bitter asshole. It's worse than when we were interns and the whole Izzie and Denny thing was happening."

She has always felt like she's understood Alex best, even better than Izzie in some ways. It's why, ever since the initial shock of what he did faded away, she has been afraid that Alex will never come home.

"Where is he living?"

"No idea. I guess in Derek's trailer? But I don't know where it's parked. Hasn't he come back to get his stuff?"

"He already had it all out of here by the time I got home the day everything happened with the trial."

"Mere, what are you going to do?" Cristina wonders aloud.

There's nothing to do but tell the truth.

"I don't know," she replies.

When Zola wakes up from her nap twenty minutes later, Meredith can't help but feel a little nervous when she brings her downstairs. Cristina doesn't want to have kids. She really isn't even around kids that much. She doesn't know what she'll do if Cristina can't be ok with the fact that she has a baby now.

"Zola, this is Cristina. Cristina, this is Zola," she says. She sits down on the couch with Zola in her arms. She hasn't quite woken all the way up from her nap, so Zola is reluctant to look around the room. She nestles herself into Meredith's arms and regards Cristina cautiously, as a stranger.

"Hi," Cristina says.

Meredith isn't sure whether to offer to let Cristina hold her, or wait for Cristina to ask. Cristina never asks, and so she doesn't offer. But she watches Cristina regard Zola with a slight smile, and slowly, as Zola wakes up, she looks at Cristina with wide, unblinking eyes.

"So what do you guys do all day?" Cristina asks.

"Well, she eats and sleeps a lot. And we started doing her physical therapy, so that's a couple times a week." She shifts Zola in her lap before she continues. "I don't know, I'm still kind of figuring it out. I Google a lot of stuff to see what she's supposed to do all day, what I'm supposed to do with her, how to give her a bath and wash her hair, what her poop is supposed to look like. Everything."

"You Google what her poop is supposed to look like?"

"It's weird, right?"

Meredith smiles hesitantly. She wants Cristina to know that, a month ago, if someone told her that "what should my baby's poop look like?" would be in her internet search history, she would have thought they were crazy. She would have thought _she_ was crazy and she understands if that's what Cristina thinks now.

But Cristina just smiles. Not in a patronizing way, but in a way that lets her know that, despite how ridiculous she may have become, they are still friends.

"It's weird. But you're a mom."

* * *

Meredith is fired at her reevaluation meeting that follows her two-month suspension. Derek can tell she's surprised by it. Maybe she thought Richard could protect her better. Maybe she really didn't think what she did was so wrong. Either way, what's done is done. They won't be working together anymore, and although it bothers him now that he's been forced to acknowledge it as a reality, there's nothing to say. There will be no "I told you so." There will be no more questions about why. No one has won, and how they got here doesn't matter anymore.

At first, she faces it head on, which make him think that her days of avoidance really are over. But it doesn't take long before Meredith starts to seem truly upset. He suspects it's not just getting fired, although that's certainly humiliating. But she's also lost her medical license for another four months, and is on probation for five years, and who would want to hire someone with a record like that?

A week after it happens, he notices that she's been going to bed early, almost when Zola goes down for the night. She's quiet, and when he comes home from work, it seems like she doesn't know quite what to say.

It's her birthday two weeks after it happens. In all the time he's known her, she has never really wanted to do anything on this day—nothing special, anyway—despite all his prodding.

In the beginning, he thinks that this year will be a little different, but then he realizes that it's yet another year when he just wants everything to be all right again. There have been too many years when he feels this way, but today, he thinks he's finally learned. He doesn't need a grand gesture; all she's ever wanted are the little things. That's how he can make it better.

Zola has been waking up lately at six on the dot, so he makes sure he's awake at five-thirty to get her before she cries. He hears her stir, and rolls out of bed to watch her wake up. Briefly, he wonders if their house really will be finished on time; it's getting tight for all three of them to share a room. Once, after a particularly grueling night, he mentioned maybe moving Zola into Alex's empty room, but the look on Meredith's face made him drop it immediately and never bring it up again.

"Hi," he whispers. Zola, blinking herself awake, stares at him and then smiles. He picks her up and snuggles her. "Good morning. It's Mommy's birthday today."

He tiptoes out of their bedroom to fix Zola a bottle and change her diaper, and makes sure they're back upstairs before too much time passes. He trusts that if Meredith doesn't hear Zola cry, then her internal clock will wake her up anyway.

He crawls back into bed with Zola, and puts her in the middle, between him and Meredith.

"Wake Mommy up," he whispers. "She's sleeping, but you can wake her up."

He taps Meredith on the shoulder to show Zola what to do. Zola leans over as best she can and puts both hands on Meredith's chest to catch herself. Meredith groans a little at the disturbance, and opens her eyes after another moment or two.

"Hey," Derek says to her before turning back to Zola. "Zola, give Mommy a kiss."

She hasn't quite gotten the hang of giving kisses yet, but she gets the general idea. Zola leans forward and puts her open mouth on Meredith's mouth. Her aim isn't great, and she doesn't know how to pucker her lips, but he still thinks it's pretty cute when Zola gets drool all over Meredith's face.

Meredith smiles, wipes her face a bit, and then pulls Zola closer to her. "Hi, baby."

He leans over Zola and kisses her too.

"Happy birthday."

"Thanks."

She props herself up a little and kisses the top of Zola's head. "Do you want to get ready for work and I'll get her a bottle?"

"She's already had a bottle and I'm not going to work today."

"What?"

He smiles, as if to reassure her. "You're more important than work."

* * *

It's disconcerting to see him after so many weeks of silence. She doesn't visit Seattle Grace very much, but today, Derek is going to come to Zola's PT appointment, and then the three of them are going to have lunch. She and Zola are early though, and she sees Cristina at the nurses' station, so she stops to talk.

Zola sits on the counter, and a few of Meredith's old friends say hi when they pass by. But not Alex. He grabs a chart, and tries not to make eye contact.

"Hey," Meredith says quietly.

He looks up, surprised that she wants to talk to him.

"Hey," he replies. And after a moment, he adds, "She's getting big."

Meredith looks at Zola, who is staring at Alex and chewing on a pen that she must have grabbed off of the countertop.

"She is," Meredith agrees. It feels like a stone has dropped into her stomach; this is sickeningly uncomfortable. She catches Alex looking at Zola's legs. Since she's almost ready to go to physical therapy, she is wearing her tiny leg braces and knee immobilizers. They take up the better part of her leg, reaching above the thigh so that her legs stick straight out instead of bending at the knee.

"She's working on standing up," she says.

"That's great." He's sincere, but she can tell he's as uncomfortable as she is. "All right, well I'll let you get back to what you were doing."

He turns to leave, and actually gets a few steps away before Meredith realizes that this is her chance. If she doesn't say anything now, Alex will never come home. He might still never come home, but without trying now, it feels like that outcome is much more certain. Despite all that's happened, she knows that's something she does not want.

"Alex," she calls after him. She puts one hand on Zola's chest to keep her steady. When he turns around, she says, "Thank you."

He laughs a little, and shakes his head. "For what? I got you fired."

He takes a step back towards her. It's only one, but still, it's a step.

"Yeah, well." She laughs a little too. "I could have done without that. But you got Zola. We wouldn't have her if it weren't for you."

Alex shrugs, and says nothing. It seems like it's a draw as to which one of them feels worse about all that's transpired. It's true that if she couldn't have Zola and work here at the same time, she'd give up working here without a second thought. But it's also true that she could have had both.

Zola wobbles a bit, so Meredith takes her off the counter and puts her on her hip. "Come home, Alex."

"I got a place," he replies quietly. She can tell by the way he's looking at her that he never expected this offer.

"You know what I mean," she says. She's openly pleading, and as much as she would prefer not to do this in the public domain of the third floor nurses' station, it's imperative that it be done. "It doesn't matter where you live," she says, "Please come back."

"I was an asshole," he says with simple frankness.

She shrugs. "So was I. Please come back."

He nods, and relief she wasn't expecting, but now realizes she needs, washes over her.

* * *

All the books say that, what with the international adoption and the brain surgery and everything else that Zola has experienced, it's hard to say when to expect her first words.

At the grocery store one morning in mid-November, Zola sits in the basket of Meredith's shopping cart, eating a piece of cheese from the deli counter while they move through the aisles. Meredith still doesn't cook well, but over the past few months, she's gotten a bit better. Still, even if she remains a terrible cook, it amazes her how much more food they seem to go through even though they've only added one baby. With their busy schedules, everyone in the house was used to eating on the fly, usually cafeteria or vending machine food, but now that Meredith is going shopping regularly, there always seems to be a list of things to get on the fridge.

"Let's see," Meredith says, stopping the cart in front of an entire aisle of granola bars. Now that she's loaded up the cart with everything the three of them need, and Zola is still in a good mood, she moves down the list to look at what her friends asked her to pick up.

"April wants Mommy to get chocolate chip granola bars. But she doesn't say what kind."

Meredith rolls her eyes and Zola looks at her quizzically, with a small piece of cheese on her cheek. Meredith peels the cheese off Zola's face and puts it in her mouth. "Is that good?" she asks. "You can have some more when we get home and have lunch."

Turning back to the display of granola bars, she checks her list again. All it says, in April's perfect girly script, is 'chocolate chip granola bars.' She sighs, and looks at Zola.

"What do you think?" she asks. "There are about seven different brands. Some have reduced sugar, some have added protein, some are all-natural, some also have peanut butter or fruit in them…. Mommy's not a mind reader, and this is just excessive anyway."

Zola grins, and reaches for her bottle.

Meredith tries to think back, but she can't remember ever buying granola bars before, and it's not like she pays that much attention to what April eats day in and day out.

"Should I call her at work and ask her?" Meredith asks Zola. "Is that crazy?"

She shakes her head at the thought. She is a grown woman; she will not be calling another adult at her place of employment to ask her what kind of pseudo-healthy snack she would like to eat. She picks a random box up and looks at it, with the full knowledge that she is putting too much thought into this.

"What do you think?" she asks again, holding the box up for Zola to see. "Is Mommy being crazy? She is, right? This is taking too much of Mommy and Zola's time, especially when Mommy probably shouldn't even be asked to buy food for everybody else. Right?"

Zola stares at her for a second, and then says, quite distinctly, "Mama."

Meredith drops the box on the floor. It stays there while she spends the next two minutes trying to get Zola to say it again, this time into the phone for Derek.

* * *

For a brief moment, he thinks about how close he almost came to selling this land. After he rolled out the blueprints on Meredith's kitchen counter, after the fighting and the stupid distractions and everything else they had put each other through, it seems a miracle that this hilltop is illuminated in candlelight once again.

Even though much has changed, the fundamentals are still there. Meredith lit this place up three years ago, and they committed and made plans, and now, Meredith lights this house up again. It's real now; no more candle blueprints or bare beams and piles of nails. It's a real house, with a porcelain tub and hardwood floors and a view overlooking the city. The candles have found a more permanent home on the living room mantelpiece and on the bathroom windowsill by the tub and in their bedroom, where they light up the framed post-it note over the bed. In the most improbable miracle of all, there is a nursery down the hall from their bedroom, where a small girl sleeps every night.

But then again, it's the season for miracles, and as such, it seems only right that they finally moved into their house two weeks ago. They'll travel to Connecticut to see his family in two days, but for now, Derek relishes this quiet Christmas Eve with his family.

There were so many times when he was sure he would never get anything he wanted, so many times when he thought that they'd finally hurt each other too many times or too badly, and more times than he could have ever imagined possible when he wasn't sure they'd both live to see this happen.

But all of that uncertainty has been dulled, and pushed aside, the way grief can be only when it is confronted with shocking, overwhelming happiness. Despite everything that's happened, despite the distractions, and despite all that's left to do, when he looks at the heart of the matter, he's gotten much more than he could have ever imagined. It's all he's ever wanted.

In front of a roaring fire, he and Meredith snuggle on the couch while the last few moments of a Christmas special play on television. Meredith is wrapped up in a blanket next to him, and he reclines a bit into the plush cushions. Zola sleeps in his lap with her head on his chest, exhausted from the day's excitement and the warm, quiet space of her father's arms. She is wearing white pajamas with red Santa hats printed on them, a gift from one of his sisters in anticipation for the next morning.

"She slept through the entire thing," Meredith says in the final moments of the show. She smoothes Zola's hair and uses a finger to wipe drool from Zola's open mouth.

He holds Zola closer, laying a hand gently on her back and kissing the top of her head. He breathes in the light, clean scent of her shampoo and thinks again that it's better than he thought it could be.

"We have tomorrow."

* * *

"What the hell are you supposed to wear to court?" Meredith asks aloud. She runs a flat iron through her hair and looks in the mirror, back at Derek. It's so much easier for him. He can just wear a suit and tie and be done with it, but she's agonized over this choice for days.

"I think that looks good," he says. She's most comfortable in scrubs or jeans; she knows she can't wear either of those to this hearing, but anything else makes her feel like she's something she isn't. She's finally settled on black pants, a black blazer, and a white blouse. It's a little corporate for her taste, but she doesn't want to leave anything to chance.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes." He adjusts his tie in the mirror behind her, and then kisses the un-straightened side of her hair. "It's ok. You heard Janet; these last steps hardly ever go wrong."

Of course, she already knows. Their lawyer and Janet have told them that this is, for the most part, a formality. They don't see any reason why they should be denied permanent custody of Zola and why this adoption should not be finalized. But still. Meredith knows that the best laid plans, especially hers, tend to go awry.

"What about what Zola's wearing?" she asks.

"The white dress my mom sent, right?"

"Yeah," Meredith replies. She's laid it out on their bed along with a pair of tiny white shoes early this morning, but even that, she's second-guessing. "Unless you think it makes her look too—"

"Hmm?" Derek asks.

"I don't know. She's not a sacrificial offering we're going to make to the judge. Does she look too—I don't know—lamb-like in it?"

"I think she looks adorable, but then again, I'm extremely biased."

Meredith sighs, and then smiles. "She is adorable." Ducking her head out of the bathroom for a second, she looks into the bedroom. Zola peers at them through the bars of her crib. She's had her breakfast, but they haven't changed her into the dress yet in case she is still hungry.

"Zola," she calls. "You like that dress, right?"

She doesn't expect an answer, but she does like to get into the habit of asking. Zola wore it for a few minutes yesterday, just to make sure that it fit, and she didn't cry, so Meredith supposes that's as close to "I like this" as a one-year-old is going to get.

"Ok, can you change her?" Meredith asks Derek. She starts straightening the other side of her hair, puts the hair straightener down to start her eye makeup, and then picks it back up. They have plenty of time; court is twenty minutes away and they don't need to be there for another hour, but she can't settle.

"Come on, Zola," Derek says cheerfully, "Mommy wants to get you ready to be offered up to the powers that be."

"Derek."

As stressed as she is, it's nice that he's joking. It's nicer still that she doesn't feel like she's compounding her nervousness about finalizing Zola's adoption with a different nervousness about seeming crazy in front of Derek. There are still choices to be made and broken things to fix, but for this, the most important thing, they are and always have been on the same side.

He hasn't left the bathroom yet. Instead, he's staring at her with an amused sort of look on his face. He grasps her shoulder, and looks at her in the mirror.

"It's just like when we got married," he says quietly. "The second time. You and I knew we were already married. We just had to make it legal. It's the same thing now, so don't worry. You and I already know she's our daughter. We just have to make it legal again."

He kisses her hair again, and leaves to dress Zola.

Two hours later, Meredith and Derek stand up in front of the judge and make it legal. Meredith holds Zola in her white dress, they take pictures with the judge and with Janet, and then they sign papers that tell everyone else what they've known for seven months: Zola is their daughter.

Today, there is no worrying, and no resentment, and no uncertainty. There is no Alzheimer's, and there is no surgical ward. No one, and nothing, is trying to take their future away. There is only bounding joy and possibilities.

The week after they stand up for Zola in court, something amazing happens. In a third floor office of Seattle Grace-Mercy West Hospital's PT department, Zola, wearing leg braces and knee-immobilizers that reach mid-thigh, stands up too. She lightly holds Meredith's hands for balance, but she barely needs her help. Meredith cries, and Zola smiles proudly as she stands by herself for two whole minutes.

* * *

He makes it a point to be home for dinner every single night now, unless there is an emergency from which he absolutely cannot get away. Zola knows when he's not there, and more than that, eight months of being home alone with Zola has been exhausting for Meredith. He knows that she loves Zola, but he never expected her to love Mommy and Me music class, and Gymboree. He's not surprised when it turns out that she really does hate these things. So he comes home, and cooks dinner almost every night.

Zola, at fifteen months old, eats a lot of what they eat, even if Meredith does have a tendency to cut everything up into miniscule pieces, or mash it up to such a degree that it is unrecognizable.

Tonight, over dinner, Meredith freaks out. Last month, she began her job search, and tomorrow, she has an interview at Seattle Presbyterian.

"I haven't been on a job interview in six years," she says. "And even then, that wasn't even real."

"When you had to interview for residency placements?" he asks. "That was real."

"Yeah, well, it helped that everybody who had any power whatsoever at Seattle Grace knew my mother."

Meredith scoops a bite of mashed sweet potatoes off of Zola's plate with a finger and puts it in Zola's mouth. She eats well, but sometimes she gets bored or distracted, and slows down. He feels badly when this happens, wondering if she's tired. Meredith has gradually pushed Zola's schedule back so that she wakes up later and goes to bed later, all so they can have these meals together and so he can spend time with her in the evening.

"You got into other programs too," he said.

"Yeah, well, everybody in the country knew who my mother was, didn't they?"

He cuts a bite of steak and wonders at the transition. Six months ago, she was confident enough to knowingly manipulate an important clinical trial. Now, she questions her most fundamental skills and qualifications, like she might not have deserved anything she got.

"Meredith, you are qualified," he assures her. "More than qualified. You can ace this job interview."

Meredith winces but says nothing. He gets up to refill Zola's sippy cup with water, and when he sits back down at the table, he asks her if she wants to practice.

"Practice?"

"Yeah, for your interview," he says calmly.

She rolls her eyes, but then agrees. After they put Zola to bed, they sit in the living room, across from each other. He tells her to pretend that it's a real interview, and to just say what she would say if asked the same questions tomorrow morning. At first, she sits Indian-style on the armchair across from him, but when she realizes that he's actually playing the part of the interviewer, she switches to sit with her legs crossed.

Her instincts are generally good, but then again, he's always known that to be true. All the best doctors can think on their feet, and she certainly proves that when she answers his questions. Her answers, though they sound slightly rehearsed (has she practiced with Zola as an audience, he wonders), also sound sincere.

He takes a deep breath, and asks the question he has been putting off for as long as possible. It's not something either of them really wants to talk about anymore, but he'd be doing her a disservice if he didn't at least give her the opportunity to give a practice answer, and quite honestly, part of him wants to know, _has_ to know.

"You were suspended and then fired from Seattle Grace Mercy West's surgical residency program, and your medical license was only recently reactivated."

He stops for a moment. Up until now, it's been easy to play the interviewer, to avoid mixing professional and personal concerns. For this, though, he doesn't know how to find out what they will want to know without marring the question with what he wants to know. He thinks before he speaks again, testing out different questions before he asks. Why did you do it? What were you thinking? Was it worth it? And then he settles.

"How can we trust that something like this won't happen again?"

Meredith looks at him helplessly. She grasps her hands together, and , breaking character, whispers, "What should I say?"

"Just tell the truth."

Meredith nods, and doesn't say anything for a full minute.

"Ok," she says, sighing. "So, you don't know that it won't happen again. Not for sure, anyway. But I believe I'm a good doctor. I'm capable. I care about my patients. That's why all of this happened in the first place."

She stops, gauging his reaction, but he says nothing.

"We all took an oath to do no harm," she says. "I thought I was trying to uphold that oath. But all of this has taught me that it's more complicated than that, and even though I was trying not to do harm to my patient—or allow her to be harmed—I caused a lot of pain that I didn't think about. I can't promise that I'm not going to butt heads with other doctors about what's best for my patients, because I know what it's like to watch someone you love almost die right before your eyes. I know what it's like to watch someone waste away. Those experiences have made me a more sympathetic person, and, I think, a better doctor."

In the periphery of his mind, he remembers her pleading with him to stay awake. He can almost feel the pressure of both of her hands on his chest. He represses a shudder when he recalls the clamminess of her frozen skin. And then, like it happened yesterday, he remembers the weight of her head on his shoulder as she breathed into a paper bag. He cannot truthfully say that those memories did not change the way he practices medicine too.

"This experience has made me think about how else I need to be a good doctor," she says, her voice growing more confident as she continues to talk. "I know that that's complicated. And I know that there is a time for split-second decision-making in medicine, and that time wasn't it. It's something I think about a lot more now: the difference between making the split-second decision and making the decision that causes the least harm. Sometimes those things are different, and sometimes they're not. You can trust that I know the difference now."

He nods, but doesn't say anything. He tries to get back in character, to finish the mock interview, but he finds it difficult when he sees that she's fighting tears.

"Do you think it's too long?" she asks.

"No," he replies. "You should say that if they ask."

"So you think it's ok?"

He watches her for a moment, and somehow, what felt impossible a few months ago, now feels natural.

"Yeah," he says. "It's ok."

A week after Meredith's interview, he wonders for a moment if it is his place to do this. But then he picks up the phone. He's only met the chief of surgery at Seattle Pres a few times, at conferences and city-wide medical functions when he too was the chief of surgery. He knows that they barely have a working relationship, but he has to try anyway.

Dr. Greg Freehold takes his call, but is quickly surprised to learn that Derek wants to talk about a job interview they conducted last week for an open spot in their surgical residency program. Derek decides to go for full disclosure; he explains the situation and says that Meredith is his wife, but even if she weren't, he would feel compelled to make this call.

"I have to say, Derek, a suspended medical license doesn't look great. You know how it is; we have enough problems with malpractice suits even without this bull's-eye on one of our residents. It's a risk I'm not generally inclined to take, especially when I've got qualified people lined up to take this spot. Be honest with me, Derek. Is she a good doctor?"

"She's excellent."

* * *

The day Meredith accepts the surgical resident position at Seattle Pres, Derek goes to Richard and tells him that he needs to go part-time until further notice. They want to minimize Zola's time in daycare; surely Richard can understand that.

Richard asks for a few weeks to hire a part-time neurosurgeon to pick up the slack, but he agrees with no argument. More than that, he actually seems happy to be able to do something for them.

Somehow, it all works out. Meredith was able to negotiate a three-week lag between accepting the position and actually starting, giving them enough time to figure out Zola's new schedule. It'll be a combination of the two of them and Seattle Grace's daycare taking care of her, and it'll take some organization and some sacrifice to keep everything straight, but for now, it seems like it will work.

A few days before Meredith starts work, he waits with her in the PT office, a place that has grown quite familiar over the past year, for Zola to show off.

"Do you want to show Mommy and Daddy what you can do?" Marlene, Zola's favorite on the PT staff asks.

Zola nods, and Marlene helps her stand up and place her hands on an impossibly small walker. Zola leans backwards onto the walker's handlebars, which wrap around her back in a U-shape, leaving the front of her unencumbered.

She wears her orthotic braces, which cover her legs almost entirely, over a pair of purple leggings, but the braces are partially covered by a coordinating purple dress. Zola looks less like a baby and more like a little girl now that she is eighteen months old. Her face has started to angle out a bit, and her hair is longer. As capable as he is with his own hair, he's still hopeless when it comes to Zola's, so Meredith has pulled it into two puffy pigtails.

"Meredith, Derek, why don't you stand back a bit," Marlene suggests.

"Like here?" Meredith asks, backing up about five feet.

"A bit more," Marlene says with a smile. When they move further back and sit down on the floor, Marlene turns back to Zola and says, "Ok, are you ready, Zola? Show Mommy and Daddy what you can do. Go get Mommy and Daddy."

Slowly, Zola swings her right leg forward. The way her leg braces are now cause her to swing her entire leg in front of her, but as she gets better at this, she might be able to have a more normal gait.

Derek takes his eyes off Zola for one second, just long enough to see Meredith start crying, but then can't make himself look away from his daughter at all. She takes the most deliberate, arduous steps he's ever seen, and Marlene is behind her the whole way, guiding the walker, but it hardly matters what they look like. And Marlene was right; five feet back wasn't challenging enough for Zola.

After a minute or two, Zola, gritting her teeth, takes the last step. Standing in front of them, her face breaks out into a smile. He knows she hasn't quite mastered how to leverage her body, and transition from leaning on the walker to standing on her own power, so when Zola gets to them, he grabs her and hugs her so tightly.

"Zola, that was so good!" he exclaims, not at all surprised to discover that his own voice is thick with tears.

"Walk, Daddy," she replies proudly.

"Yes, you did!"

Tears roll down Meredith's face, and Zola, still in Derek's arms, leans forward to put both hands on Meredith's cheeks. Meredith cups Zola's head in both hands, and kisses her forehead.

* * *

A few days later, Meredith leaves the house bright and early for her first day of work. Her friends are becoming attendings soon, and she still has another year as a resident, but she's excited to go back.

She opens her car door, puts her coffee in the cup holder, and her bag in the passenger seat. And then she looks back, one last time. Derek is holding Zola behind the glass storm door. They're both still in their pajamas and bare feet. He's staying home with Zola today so they can slowly transition her into daycare instead of changing everything all at once, and when she left, it didn't seem like they were in any hurry to truly start the day.

Meredith waves, and she laughs when Zola waves back with both hands. She can read her lips from behind the door; she can tell she's saying, "Bye bye, Mommy."

She gets in her car and backs out of the driveway, and even though she's excited to get back to the OR, she's even more excited to come back home.


End file.
